Kevin A. Stoodley

Conceiver and developer of the Testarossa dynamic compilation infrastructure, which along with the J9 JVM project became the basis for all of IBM's Java language implementations, Stoodley has served as Chief Technical Officer (CTO) for Enterprise Modernization Tools and Compilers within IBM's Software Group.

Stoodley received a B.Sc. degree in Engineering Science in 1985 and his M.Sc. degree in 1988 in Electrical Engineering, both from the University of Toronto. He joined the IBM SWG Toronto Laboratory in 1988, where he started working on the first of many projects in the area of compiler optimization and code generation. After an interesting two-year stint as a third-line manager, he returned to a pure technical role as IBM's Chief Technical Officer (CTO) for Compilers.

Shortly thereafter, in 2004, Stoodley was appointed an IBM Fellow — an executive position that is IBM's highest technical designation. He was the first to be appointed to this title in the IBM Canada Laboratories, as well as one of the youngest ever among the 180 who had been appointed since the Fellow program's inception in 1963. In 1997, he was elected to the IBM Academy of Technology in recognition of his contributions to IBM's technology portfolio, particularly in the area of optimizing compilers and high-performance language implementations.

In 1999, he was made an IBM Distinguished Engineer and received a Corporate Award for the business impact of the technology that he had been a large part of creating. A few years earlier, Stoodley had conceived and started work on a new dynamic compilation infrastructure known as Testarossa, which, along with the J9 JVM project, became the basis for all of IBM's Java language implementations — themselves the underpinnings of a large part of IBM's substantial portfolio of middleware products. Since that time, Testarossa became a more generically reusable compilation component found not only in IBM's Java implementations from cell phones to servers, but also in IBM's static compilers and binary translation systems.

He has also been honored as an IBM Master Inventor for his prolific invention and innovation, which produced a broad portfolio of issued and pending patents. For his contributions to IBM's Java implementation, IBM CEO Sam Palmisano presented Stoodley with a second Corporate Award in 2007. In 2008, after moving organizationally from AIM to the Rational brand, he added IBM's suite of Enterprise Modernization Tools to his CTO responsibilities.